Introduction
When starting a side income blog, your priority should be creating high quality content.
Having good quality content will gain return visitors to your blog, who read more posts and share them more.
Other factors to consider for promoting your blog are social media, search engine optimisation (SEO), online communities and guest blogging.
Diversification is important when exploring these avenues, so that you are not relying on one avenue to maintain traffic to your blog and having good quality content will help your blog withstand search engine algorithm changes.
Social Media, Pinterest and Facebook
When using social media, spend time being active with the community and engaging with viewers by answering comments and after setting up social media, be active on it.
It’s also important to link back to your blog from social media and also ensure you link to your social media from your blog homepage.
Pinterest is a highly visual search engine that is a good source of traffic. It relies on pictures to use it, so ideally you would use Pinterest if you had images associated with posts.
A business page on Facebook can also be set up to promote your blog.
SEO
While creating engaging and in-depth content that is structured for your blog is important, Blogging SEO considerations are also important.
When starting a blog, it’s a good idea to submit your sitemap to search engines like Google and continue doing so regularly until your site gains traction. As they recognise your blog more, it will result in your site being crawled more, and you won’t need to submit them as often.
When thinking of titles for your posts and pages, put yourself in your audience’s shoes and consider what they would ask Google. Titles ideally should be about 5 – 6 words long.
Relevant headings should be used and h1, h2 etc tags used appropriately. Only one h1 tag should be used on a page (for the title). Heading tags help search engines understand the structure of content. A plugin, such as easy table of contents, can help with displaying your table of contents prominently at the top of each post or page.
Internal linking in your blog posts is important to help visitors to your blog finding related content and for gaining exposure in search engine results pages (SERPs), as it will stimulate the links on your blog being followed.
Online Communities and Blog Commenting
Find reputable sites that your blog topic relates to and share valuable knowledge on your topic.
This includes sites such as Reddit or Quora.
When commenting on blogs in a similar niche, try to provide value to the reader by sharing knowledge and leave a link to your blog, when allowed.